Summary

Aided by a huge investment from equipment manufacturer Perkin-Elmer of Norwalk, Connecticut, private entrepreneurs and academics have agreed on a joint plan to sequence the DNA of the fruit fly
Drosophila melanogaster
and a timetable for making the sequence public. It could soon become the most complex organism completed; yet the partnership aims to finish in record time--by December 1999. The project could also pave the way for a similar collaboration to sequence the human genome.